Book Review: The Vintage Book of American Women Writers
By Beth Harrington
Published: January 11th, 2011 | 12:00am
Billed as the first comprehensive anthology of female writing in America, The Vintage Book of American Women Writers digs deep into the recesses of our nation’s literary tradition to rediscover the women whose essays, poems, and short fiction have left their mark on readers in the United States over the last 350 years. In her introduction, editor Elaine Showalter of Princeton (A Jury of Her Peers) writes that “rather than admitting their own ambitions, promoting their own creativity, or claiming their place in their nation’s literary history, the founding mothers of American literature were more likely to avoid publicity and to deprecate their own achievements” in contrast to their male peers. The nearly eighty authors showcased include expected standard-bearers such as Puritan-era Massachusetts Bay poet Anne Bradstreet and twentieth-century literary femme fatale Anne Sexton as well as lesser-known authors such as Lydia Huntley Sigourney and Mary Austin from the nineteenth century.
Each selection is accompanied by a brief biographical sketch of the author, contextualizing her piece(s) as well as highlighting the challenges of poverty, divorce, discrimination, and depression and untimely death that these women often faced while struggling to fulfill their talents. Though it somewhat resembles a course reader for a college English class, The Vintage Book of American Women Writers is worth picking up for the experience of reading such an immense body of women’s writing laid out side-by-side in one volume. Showalter admirably foregoes predictability, sometimes picking obscurer works of more popular writers. However, the omission of a latter twentieth-century African American writer such as Toni Morrison or Alice Walker is noticeable.
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ABOUT THE BOOK
The Vintage Book of American Women Writers
Vintage, January 2011
848 pages
Issue #30
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